I’ll be honest with you: I don’t think I’m the target demographic for this book. At nearly thirty-one years old, I might be in the age cohort of women whose romantic lives are the target of cultural anxieties. But I have literally never participated in dating culture, straight or queer, and while I was happily single for twenty-seven years of my life (and am still technically “single” — thanks DOMA!) I’m now in a long-term relationship with my partner, doing my part to destroy marriage by having lots of gay sex.

Still, I’ve been following Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s work (you likely know her as the executive editor of Feministing, and more recently co-host with Amanda Marcotte of the Opinionated podcast) for the past five years, and figured whether or not I was in the market for feminist dating advice, Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life (Seal Press, 2011) would be worth checking out. And I wasn’t wrong. Mukhopadhyay has written a chatty-yet-incisive analysis of heteronormative dating culture — one which doesn’t avoid words like “heteronormative,” yet also doesn’t come across as a dense theoretical text that one needs to read pencil in hand.

In nine chapters, Outdated offers us a tour of modern-day hetero dating scripts as gleaned from best-selling dating advice books (e.g. He’s Just Not That Into You, The Man Whisperer), television shows, professional concern-trolling “experts,” and the personal experiences of Mukhopadhyay’s age-mates. Mukhopadhyay’s basic argument, which will be familiar to most regular readers here, is that modern dating culture and dating advice hinges on the notion that successful romantic relationships require a world of binary, oppositional masculinity and femininity, and gender essentialism, and inequality (power dynamics are sexy?). Framing romance in this way automatically pits feminist notions equality and non-binary gender and sexual expression against creating sustainable relationships — giving rise to a whole genre of concern-trolling books that blame feminism for having ruined our love lives. In that context, what’s a modern-day feminist looking for relationships to do?

Mukhopadhyay doesn’t offer prescriptive answers to this question, which I think is wise (to be prescriptive would simply be to replicate the condescension of so many dating advice manuals which presume to know what we want or need better than we do ourselves). Instead, she pushes her readers to recognize that there are myriad ways to connect and express love in the human family, and that we would do best to pay attention to what works best for us — irrespective of what the culture tells us we should or must do to achieve happiness. Through opening up a conversation about sexual diversity, socioeconomic stressors, and alternative pathways to rich interpersonal lives, Outdated offers an opening for us to explore new ways of forming communities and expressing our love for one another. If anything, I wish she’d pushed this portion of the text a bit further — since the radical potential of love is an under-explored aspect of feminist theory and practice (in my humble opinion).

In chapter nine, “The Art of Feminist Romantic Maintenance,” Mukhopadhyay asked a number of self-identified feminist authors and activists How does feminism make your love life better? Their answers are varied as the individuals themselves, and as such conversations are really only enriched by participation I thought I’d throw the same question out to all of you — how does feminism make your love life better?

My own response to the question would include the following:

Feminism, as a philosophical framework and as a community of practice, has been a space for me to break open ‘common sense’ definitions of love, relationships, human sexuality, and community. Feminist spaces encouraged me to ask “does it have to be this way?” over and over and over again

It was through feminist spaces that I found queer thinkers and activists who offered me alternatives to heteronormative scripts for creating and sustaining relationships, some of which are sexual, some of which are not.

Feminism encouraged me to take ownership of my sexuality and learn how to take pleasure in my body in a culture that is hostile to embodiment. Knowing, and being at least somewhat confident about, my body and the pleasure I can experience as an embodied person, has been hard-won in a lot of ways … and wouldn’t have been as possible without feminism in my life.

Feminism has connected me to a community of people who work against judging relationship diversity. We’re all imperfect at this, it’s true, but at least within feminist spaces I feel there is a common ground to talk about how monogamy and non-monogramy, parenting and not-parenting, queer and straight relationships, long-term and more casual sexual relationships, can all be ethical, meaningful, and healthy.

So those are my responses to the question “How does feminism make your love life better?” What are yours?

9 Responses to “Booknotes: Outdated”

In college, a guy I was madly in love with kept blowing me hot and cold. It went on for years and I just couldn’t let him go. One day I asked some female acquaintances for advice, they asked me some questions, and when they heard that I insisted on going dutch on our rare dates they HOWLED. They explained to me that I couldn’t expect a guy to be committed to me if he never had to spend money on me. Literally, if he had no financial stake in our relationship then he could have no emotional stake, and it was easy to abandon me if he wasn’t reminded of the money he’d wasted on me. Feminism made my love life better by really exposing this, and other similar kinds of bullshit, for what it is. I went dutch because I wanted to avoid ‘transactional sex’ relationships before I knew the words. Feminism gave me the words.

Feminism taught me that I didn’t have to listen to any “dating culture” rules – or even know what the rules were! I did know some of these old fashioned rules but few people that I knew in real life actually followed them.

Feminism taught me that it was okay for a woman to ask a man for a date. (I did, it was no big deal) Feminism taught me that we could define for ourselves what “date” meant – what to do, who pays, and so on – and that both parties on the date were equal partners. Feminism taught me to enforce my boundaries and respect myself. Feminism taught me that if I was not compatible with a certain man then the solution was not to change myself but to change the man.

Finally, feminism taught me that I didn’t have to date at all because my self worth was not dependent on having a boyfriend or husband.

Perhaps these are not very profound lessons for anyone these days but back in the 1970s/1980s they were important for me.

Feminism is an excellent addition to the bedroom (especially the part where it helps you use your words to have amazing sexytimes instead of waiting around for your partner to figure out what it is that you like), is all I’m sayin’.

Feminism has improved my love life (and I mean that in both the euphemistic-I-really-mean-sex sense and also in the straight-up ‘love’ sense) by helping me dramatically change my relationship with my body and my own past for the better. It–and the communities I’ve found through it–have given me ways to love my body, conceptualize it as something I can do neat stuff with rather than something primarily required to be pretty for others, ditch a whole lot of shame and angst, and feel strong. It’s also helped me find a vocabulary for articulating many important experiences both to myself and to my partner. So, um, it totally rocks.

I loathed dating, though. Ugh. I think I would have done rather better at it if more of my dating had occurred *after* I radicalized as a feminist. But alas, in marked contrast to the standard narrative about feminists, my (very positive) experiences of a super-traditional-looking lady-gent marriage and pregnancy/birth/parenting are what led me to a stronger commitment to feminism.

I think that “narrative about” is the key there, Molly … my parents’ story is much the same, in that from the outside it looks super “traditional” with my mother the full-time parent and my father the wage-earner, etc., but inside it was a radical training ground for me as a girlchild — not because I aspired to be unlike my mother, but because both of my parents just didn’t give much of a damn about oppositional gender roles or mainstream cultural narratives about gender, sexuality, and families.

I think assuming all feminists are going to look “non-traditional” confuses form with function

I keep thinking this should be easy to reply to, but it really isn’t. I didn’t have a pre-feminist love life, because since I knew there was such a thing as a feminist I was one, so it’s informed me from the start. (As did my mother, who raised me right!)

I’ve always taken ownership of my sexuality. I’ve always denied the idea of transactional sex. I’ve never had shame or angst about my body, so never had to overcome any of this stuff. (Just taking random examples from the comments above.)

So really, it’s helped to define what my love life was going to be from the start, by helping to shape my formative-years opinions of myself as a person and as a woman, and how I relate to my sexuality and my partners. There’s not really an element of ‘making it better’ because there’s nothing to compare it to – feminism has made my love life, and my life in general, what it is altogether.

I also think the ‘dating’ world is quite different in the UK to how itis in the US. I’ve never really ‘dated’ and the thought fills me with horror! The three serious relationships I’ve had have grown out of friendship and/or casual sex. The partner I was with for 10 years was supposed to be a one-night stand!

In thinking through the proposition, I think the best bit about feminism and making my love life better – was that it absolutely gave me to the tools to understand that shame/guilt/fear about sexuality was almost always about power dynamics. Once I understood this, I felt freer to work out what I liked, what I didn’t, and how to have relationships (platonic, short-term intimate, and long-term intimate) that worked for me, and the other person/people involved.

It also meant that prescribed binarous gender norm of being “female”, that I do not fit well in, was not the focus. Instead I am a person with particular characteristics and tastes. And importantly that my health and safety matter!

I wish I could say that I have always used my feminist compass in working out my love life – there have been some fails! But I have found that my current relationship (even though on the outside may look somewhat heteronormative) is based on the principles of feminism, and it’s a fulfilling relationship. Also without all that nasty gender essentialism, we have a whole lot more fun (nudge nudge wink wink!).

[…] that more informal friendships can evolve into sexual relationships in healthy ways — and the more problematic aspects of dating culture that we don’t necessarily want to resuscitate? When I ran a draft of this blog post by my […]